


Kämpfen

by Huntsmonsters



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Humor, K-Day, M/M, Relationship Study, Tattoos, anxiety disorders, fill-in scenes, mako being a badass, newton/herman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-14
Updated: 2013-08-14
Packaged: 2017-12-23 11:07:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/925650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Huntsmonsters/pseuds/Huntsmonsters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The point is that Hermann loves numbers like they were his children, except that Hermann hates children. He loves them and the way they go together the way Newt loves every sample that enters his collection, the way he loves tattoo needles and his books of scribbled anatomical drawings and the harried, barely legible, 4 in the morning notes scrawled around them when the first pieces of a freshly dead Kaiju come in. These are the tools with which they carve themselves, the knives and chisels and guides, the planes on which their shapes are made. Hermann is held up by his cane, but it isn't the reason he's standing. They've both gone through the rabbit hole and come out again with something clenched in their fists. " </p><p>In which arguments are had over equations and entrails, vivisections are banned, and Newt uses ink to prepare for the possibility of death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kämpfen

**Author's Note:**

> Not even sure how this one happened or what happened. I would describe it as more a character study of Newt than anything, with a hefty dose of how his brain works. I want to write more with these two and this did not turn out the chucklefest I was expecting but I hope it scratches an itch for some people. I expect this one to be stand alone but I'd like to write a fic from Hermann's perspective next, so I would not be surprised if this turns into something more like a series than a consistent fic with chapters.
> 
> This was a real labor of love and I'd adore any feedback you might have.

Here's how it starts - it starts with a fight over whose discipline of choice is better.

Now, make no mistake, they've had these fights before. They've had a lot of these fights, actually, about who makes a bigger and better contribution to the fight against the impending destruction of the human race, but then again, they also fight over who is the best Gundam pilot (mostly just Newt shouting _"DUO MAXWELL, HERMANN"_ , getting louder each time Hermann offers no rebuttal but faster chalk squeaks on the blackboard) and whose mom made better lunches when they were children (Newt refuses to concede anything was better than mom's pb & js with banana slices and the crusts cut off just one half). They fight. If any verb applies to them, cohesively, as a unit of two scientists under pressure that would have made sweat bead on Oppenheimer's brow, it is that one.

They treat all arguments with an equal level of respect, intensity, and threats of immediate violence. They are at the top of their respective fields, and one does not get there without the tenacity to make each daily challenge into a battle. Newt and Hermann are as much soldiers as the pilots out there in massive rigs, slogging through the ocean like their vocational ancestors did through the frozen Ardennes, today fighting a less logical, more finite enemy. What two of them fight, however, is theory. What they fight is sleep, and memory, and the empty spaces in their knowledge, and the slip slide of time between events at the breach. And each other. They fight each other too.

Maybe it's like sharpening a blade with another blade. Hermann would disagree, and say it was more like sharpening a razor on a strop, coming up against something dull and rough enough to cull the fabric of his being to a cutting edge. Newt would, hey, resent that, man.

Newt is currently stuffing a kaiju entrail section back into a specimen container. It fit before he took it out to extract samples. Now, like magic, it doesn't anymore.

He didn't really need the samples, but it's noon, and noon is always dissection hour. Initially it was 'Vivisection Hour', but after the incident with the skin parasite Stacker had banned vivisections when Hermann was in the lab. It warms Newt's heart to see Hermann turn his chair completely around at his desk toward the wall in hopes of escaping some of the smell of mortifying kaiju and preservative. They have to use beefed up formeldahyde, since the tissue breaks down in just about anything else. Newt loves it. It makes him feel like the fucking re-animator. Hermann does not love it so much.

Now that Newt's trying to get the entrails back in, it's like shoving an umbrella back into one of those little sleeve things he always loses. It just doesn't go the way it's supposed to, squelching around his fingers, and it makes him argue even faster. Stacker stopped by earlier, and his disinterest in anything but what Hermann's predictive model had to say is still stinging. "Listen, what you do is crunch numbers and make guesses about the future. Okay? You're like one of those new agey ladies with crystals and a shawl." He lifts a hand covered in gray slime, and begins wiggling his fingers at Hermann. "'There will be a tall dark kaiju in your future - but do not trust him! He only wants to take advantage of your tasty cities."

"Yes," Hermann said, wiping his hands clean of chalk dust on a clean towel kept on his desk, "You are, of course, correct. _Math_ is more guesswork than the study of organs in creatures with such infinite variation from one to the next that no conclusions can be assumed to carry over. Utter sense. Sheer logic."

"Math can't use a kaiju brain to cure cancer, Hermann. Or make people fly."

"You have done neither."

"But I could!" Newt says, throwing both hands up now. Bits of gray slime flick onto Hermann's blackboard, and Hermann turns to regard the little specks with eye-watering distaste. "Math can't tell you what's in a Kaiju's chemical makeup, buddy, and I can, and I can tell you how to kill them before they crunch us into pancakes. Before their beautiful, beautiful giant feet crunch us into pancakes."

"But your studies cannot tell when they will come, nor define their pattern of entry, nor a way to seal the breach," Hermann said, shoulders sliding back, brow cocked. "Admit to yourself that you are merely jealous that the marshal was disinterested in your increasingly erratic experimental suggestions. How hard can that be?"

"Yeah? _Your_ theories," Newt says, laughing breathlessly, incredulous, "are all about crunching numbers with no real leaps of logic! There's no creativity in it. There's no-no art of singing neurons! No fluid! There's no _permeability_!" He squelches the entrails down one last time, then fixes the cap on with a rubbery snap. There. A little bit is still sticking out from under the edge, but he can fix it later. "My theories aren't crazy. You've just got too many numbers in your brain to fit anything good in there."

"You're babbling," Hermann says. Newt can see, though, that he's getting red around the collar of his dress shirt, knows that he's thinking numbers sing too, sing a song with erratic and functionally perfect harmonies. Newt should have more self-preservation than this, but he doesn't, he can't. He sees reaction and he pushes to see it again. It's an old, bad scientist's habit, but he's had it since he was still in a high-chair, throwing cheerios around just to watch his mother put them back in the bowl, over and over. Action and reaction is what makes his brain twitch and his neurochemicals waltz with each other. And Herman's the perfect partner because of it. No matter how many times Newt grabs his cheerios, he still tries to put them back in the bowl.

But this is the point, right? It isn't an argument if Hermann doesn't give a fuck and Newt knows how much he cares about his field of study, has heard him murmuring the nonsense equations of dreams to himself in his sleep. And what does that mean. Is Newt is staying awake every night to listen through the echoing iron walls of his fish tank bunk room for Hermann's voice next door muttering during REM? No. No, it doesn't mean that. Not technically.

The point is that Hermann loves numbers like they were his children, except that Hermann hates children. He loves them and the way they go together the way Newt loves every sample that enters his collection, the way he loves tattoo needles and his books of scribbled anatomical drawings and the harried, barely legible, 4 in the morning notes scrawled around them when the first pieces of a freshly dead Kaiju come in. These are the tools with which they carve themselves, the knives and chisels and guides, the planes on which their shapes are made. Hermann is held up by his cane, but it isn't the reason he's standing. They've both gone through the rabbit hole and come out again with something clenched in their fists. 

Which is why Newt has to try to rip it from him, just to see, just to catalog the shade of red the veins in his face turn his fucking pale-ass European skin, because he's going to remember that color and get his next tattoo done just in that. That shade, maybe the the breach equation, somewhere no one can see except him, underneath the layers of his dermis until death. "Numbers are dead," Newt says. He knows he might as well have called Hermann's mother a filthy name from the color his face turns. God fucking damn it, he wishes he had a camera. Or one of those pantone things. What is that color? Chartreuse? No that's another thing. Vermilion? He likes the way that word sounds, vermilion.

"Numbers," Hermann grates, lifting his chin, "Are the building blocks of every scrap of tissue that you study. And you can hardly talk of dead things." He jabs a finger in the direction of the entrails in the container under Newt's sticky fingers. He's apparently forgotten that Newt is meant to just be jealous. And that's good. Newt keeps going.

He shrugs, pushes his glasses up, and then regrets it a lot. Now there's a mark of slime on the bridge of his nose. He should stop here, stop now, take the blood that he's earned and go home, but that thought doesn't even spark out the other side of his neural pathways. All his life, 'stop doing that' has gotten strangled somewhere so far down the line that he never even puts the words together in a sentence. Maybe there's something wrong with his frontal lobe, or maybe never ever looking two steps ahead is what makes him a badass. Stop and Now. Why? Not Now, of course not Now, when his heart pumping adrenaline to his fingertips. Is that normal, to feel that, when fighting with a co-worker? 

There's a delicious pause where these things cross his mind, rapid fire, and then he leans over his desk. And maybe he's a little indignant, and yeah, maybe he's kinda sorta jealous that the peons have all got minds too small to understand what it would mean if Newt really could drift with a kaiju. Maybe it's a disappointment that Hermann doesn't get it, the one person in the world who he maybe, just maybe, expected to understand. Maybe Hermann misses the thing Newt cares about most, and he wants him to feel some of that too. He misses that the kaiju are beautiful and not just a variable. So many things fly over his stupid, brilliant, stiffly held head. "You know what, if it was just _you_ in here, with your _equations_ , and no _me_ to actually do big boy science -"

Hermann gets up from his desk and grasps his cane. He walks toward Newt with deliberate speed. "'Big boy science'?" he repeats, voice at the sharp edge of cold. His face is still red, and his voice has dropped in volume, not intensity. He stops in front of Newt's desk.

"Well, yeah," Newt says. He spreads his hands. "Look man, at least I deal with real stuff, alright? They're right here." He sweeps his hands out from his body to all the precious things around him floating in jars. "Reality. Hard science. Not like some seance-style predictive equation."

It's not true, and Newt knows it, but that isn't the point. The point is to win. And when Hermann meets his gaze, black and still like a shark, something clicks. He's so busy realizing it that when Hermann lifts his cane and sweeps Newt's sample off the edge of the desk, he almost misses catching it and lets it shatter open on the ground. He drops to his knees and skids so hard they ache, snatching the sample up with both hands. He clutches it to his chest, taking a short, sharp breath. Hermann turns for the door.

"And I can do whatever is asked of my abilities in a vacuum," Hermann says, rolling his syllables the way he does when he wants to be a cut above condescending and formal. He gestures with the cane to the samples in jars. "No crutches."

The door shuts behind him, and Newt blinks.

"Shit. Fuck."

 

Newt hates to lose. It's one of his worst qualities. He's also pretty neurotic as these things go and an utter rock star, and these personality qualities make for a fairly difficult type of person to deal with. There's a reason he got six PhDs by the time he hit his late twenties. You learn early when you're not a people person, and crustaceans and fossils seemed more appealing than keggers. Actually, anything seems more appealing than a kegger. Going to a punk club, maybe, or getting your teeth removed by Hermann Gottlieb.

Usually he and Hermann eat lunch together, but not today. Today, Hermann is nowhere to be found after their minor disagreement in the lab, so Newt sits down in a corner of the mess with his weather beaten copy of _In The Mountains of Madness_. It's one of his go-to feel good books.

He's just getting to the part where they penetrate the arctic city of the freaky jelly creatures when Mako sits down across from him. Newt slowly lowers the book from his line of sight to meet her small smile. He blinks, and offers an elegant, "Hey."

"Do you mind?" she asks, before unloading her silverware. 

"Nah, go for it," Newt tells her, one-shoulder shrugging as if it's not totally weird that the boss's daughter wants to have a chat. Newt's met her, of course, and they've spoken before. How could they not have? They've all been on this grand project for more than a decade. He's known her since she was a teenager, watched her grow up into a woman with increasing savvy and calm under fire. But he tends to stay in the lab and do the science stuff, and she's on the military side, so most of his interactions with her have been as a stand-in for the Marshall.

She offers a short nod of thanks and settles in. It's pho day, and she's gone with a heavy load of toppings. Newt wonders vaguely how she stays so thin when he's gone so soft in the belly since they moved to the Hong Kong Shatterdome with its stupidly awesome cooks, then realizes his thoughts sound like the front headlines of a Marie Clare issue and stops. 

He picks up his own chopsticks, her arrival reminding him that he does actually have food on the table in front of him. He begins adding toppings one by one. Brisket, bean sprouts, and plenty of basil, not to mention some crunchy, neon orange carrots. He grabbed them for color, because he's a gourmand that way, nevermind the fact that he went four days last week on nothing but Kaiju energy drink and the occasional shot of vodka. "So, what brings you down to the mess?" he asked. He glances behind her. "Where - ah - is your buddy? The new guy?"

That being the new guy he'd gotten thoroughly pantsed by in the elevator because he didn't realize he was talking to one of the Becket brothers. It's been such a great day! Mako shakes her head minutely. "He is resting," she says, winding noodles into her spoon with her chopsticks. 

That seems fair to Newt. There won't be much time for that soon, if Captain Posh's predictions are right, and he isn't admitting they are. "Did I hear you two did awesome in the Kwoon? A guy who was there said it was like seeing -"

"Ginger and Fred dancing," Mako finishes, and smiles. Newt smiles back at her. In that quirk in her lip is the reserve of a woman, the pleasure of a little girl, and the depths of wisdom to know what such a comparison could mean, so far as the history of Jaeger pilots goes. "I know," she says. 

"But no piloting?" he asks. He slurps in a mouthful of noodles, talking around them. "That's messed up. If you two are the best for the job, why not you two? What's the holdup? Everybody on the station knows how high you scored on your tests, and even though I don't believe in standardized testing I think that has to show you're meant for it. Like fate. If it existed."

That little wise smile and those smooth blue highlights - in another life, maybe, and if he swung harder toward that side of the Kinsey scale, man, what a perfect package. But there is disappointment too in the cant of her mouth, and instead of answering, she asks, "Why do you not believe in standardized tests?"

"I had a bad experience with the SAT," he says. He is trying to wind his noodles onto his spoon like she did and they keep slipping off. It reminds him of the kaiju entrails earlier. Nothing fits today, nothing stays where it's supposed to. He gets half a spoon of noodles and carrots mingling with savory broth. He swallows, adding, "I kind of failed it? I told the proctor the questions were stupid and so was his face. So then I had to take a train down to Cambridge and stalk the admissions officer for MIT to get him to look at the research on reptilian tissue regeneration I did on my pet cobra just so I could get accepted, and it was such a pain in the ass. So I hate them basically on principal, and because once one made me get on a train." 

Mako laughs a little, polishing off her soup. Whoa, that bowl was huge and he was only a third of the way done. Where did she pack it away? "Has anyone ever checked out the microorganisms in your stomach?" Newt asks. "Because I think there's something strange going on down there."

Mako raises one eyebrow a fraction, open confusion. "Mr. Geiszler, are you making advances?"

Newt's eyes widen immediately. "Wait, what? No. No definitely not. Oh my god, no. And don't tell your dad, okay? I mean, I was just thinking that if things were different, I mean if I was different - but this isn't -"

Mako laughs. She places her chopsticks into her bowl and puts her dishes on her tray. "You are not very good with humor," she observes, standing up from the table. "You should practice, and you should speak with Mr. Gottlieb." Her kind eyes are fixed on him. "He was very...red when I saw him."

Then, gone in a flash. A pho devouring monster, preying on his fear of being murdered by Stacker Pentecost.

Newt likes her. He really does.

 

Newt doesn't see Hermann again, not that day. He doesn't come back to the lab, sending a grunt to come pick up a few papers he needs rather than coming to get them himself. Newt drinks a lot of coffee and curses out his microscope when it doesn't focus correctly. He blasts Band of Skulls (he's one of those guys who still listens to the stuff he listened to in college). When night falls, he breaks out the bottle of St. Germain under his desk, pouring himself tall glasses with ice and drinking it straight. He doesn't touch his medication in the drawer, and he doesn't go to dinner. Instead, he locks the door to the lab and begins tinkering with something he's pretty sure is going to save everyone's lives, if it doesn't fry his brain first.

He has an uneasy feeling, though. He carries it with him all afternoon. The hush in the lab after dark makes him feel like everyone is already dead, though he can still hear the hum-shriek of machines in the distance, of welding through the night to get Gipsy Danger up to snuff. He is sitting on the floor when two in the morning hits, and the lab now smells like burnt rubber, metal, and trash. He rubs his bleary eyes with the base of his palms, and when he takes a long draught from his glass, his eyes fall on the edge of his ink, the swirl of color that neatly terminates around his wrist.

K-Day. That's what the silence in the lab and shrieking metal in the distance remind him of. He was there. He was visiting San Francisco to attend a conference, still the wunderkind student from MIT then, with four PhDs already under his belt, teaching students older than he was at graduate lectures. The organizers of the conference asked him to give a presentation on his ongoing work into artificial tissue replication, and he agreed on the condition they would pay his bar tab and give him a good enough appearance fee to afford a suite of new lab equipment.

His research then was the sort of thing that would have saved his uncle, if he'd been able to learn faster, work hard enough to find the cure before he died. He honestly believed, then, that he'd be able to fix it. It. All of it. He'd build limbs and grow new neurons from the host's own extracted skin cells. Nobody would ever get early-onset Alzheimer's ever again, because no one would get degenerative diseases ever again. He flew high on the power and drive of his own ideas, and he saw a future where he was the biggest fucking superhero in the scientific community. Where people respected him, and guys older than him didn't treat him like the weird nerd. He was going to rake in the dick with a non-literal rake while being a completely literal rake, and people were not going to die of horrific, soul-stealing diseases, and it was going to be the best.

He was in his hotel room when the ground shook, par for the course in California, but he was at the window in seconds once he heard the sound. He knew that sound. He'd studied people and rats and fish at the bottom of the ocean without eyes and mammals the size of houses. He'd cataloged and analyzed anatomy, skin, shit, mucus, and muscle fiber since he could read. That sound wasn't an earthquake.

In its own way, though, it was. He could see the bridge from his window (Golden Gate Views! the brochure at the front desk proclaimed). He couldn't open his window, though, so he couldn't hear the screams, just the wrenching tear of steel beams being warped and twisted like tree branches in a hurricane. He stood there until the beast slammed through the bridge, tearing it with the weight of its immense body like so much wet paper. Then Newt dropped down to the floor and pressed the bridges of his hands to his eyes.

It was literally a scenario like in his nightmares. He had a lot of dreams about getting eaten, probably because it always seemed like the most fitting way for him to die as well as the most ignoble. Then he would wake up, sweaty but happy to escape from the guts of something carnivorous with too many teeth. But even with his eyes closed, he could feel the shaking of the floor, and his breathing only sped up.

The little bottle of pills were in his bag all the way on the other side of the room, and he was too afraid to move to get them. There was no coming down from this, no breaking out the other side. 

In the thready voice of panic he started to speak. "Approximately 300 feet tall. Weight estimated in the thousands of tons, heavy enough to break concrete and high tension cables but with a skeletal structure able to support the weight of enough muscle to move those bones. What is it made of?"

It wasn't a robot, and this wasn't a manga, so what was in those bones? What elements threaded through them? Where did they come from? He began to spin through the periodic table and his breathing slowed. He carefully lowered a bell jar in his mind over the thing he had just seen.

All flights were grounded the next day as the beast stomped on Oakland, so Newt drew in his notebook. Two weeks later, when he was back in Cambridge, he found the best tattoo artist money could buy and blew his appearance fee from the conference that had never happened on ink. Pain and pleasure worked in strokes through his arm, and when he got back to his apartment he collapsed into a loose, boneless pile of relief. He looked at the fresh, bloody monster on his arm and knew that he could conquer the fear by knowing, and that knowing created passion. He always found himself drawn to things that would probably kill him, given the opportunity, creatures like the ones that ate him in his nightmares. He loved them, and reveled in the perversity. He was Grizzly Man, but with monsters the size of the Empire State building.

Within three years, he was the foremost expert in the field of Kaiju biology in the world.

 

When the Pons is finished, it's three in the morning and Newt leaves the Shatterdome. He moves through the streets of Hong Kong, slick with rain and neon light, and he stops for no one. He has to make this quick.

He might die tonight. There's a pretty distinct possibility that his brains are going to leak out through every orifice in his head, but that's okay, because the very thought of merging with the brain of a creature a hundred times the size of him and so infinitely, beautifully unique and destructive makes his legs nearly give out from the anticipation. Hey, man, he could save the world tonight, if he doesn't melt his brain first. He owes himself a present.

He put this design down on a piece of paper like all the rest, and when he gives it to the guy at the grungy tattoo parlor, there are no questions. He makes a point of finding the best inker in each city he lives in, and he's convinced that Yao is the best in Hong Kong. He works in a grungy tattoo parlor in the Bone Slums. There's a poster of Trespasser on the back wall, covering years of metal and movie posters, faded and peeking out from behind on all sides. The room smells like rubbing alcohol, dust, and stale noodles and roast pork from the place next door. It's perfect.

It's a quick job, since it's only one color, and Newt's back to the Shatterdome in no time flat. He takes the bandage off before he puts on the helmet, because if there's nothing to draw attention to it no one is ever going to know about the numbers, done in red, winding around the top of his ribcage, almost invisible, blending with the tattoos below. He's excited like a kid on Christmas, and he's scared like a death row inmate, because it's all too inevitable that he'll pull the trigger on his own demise, if not today then some other time. But he's got numbers under his skin now, and they mean something. Now that they're there, he owns them, he controls them, and if he dies tonight, Hermann never needs to know where he lived once.


End file.
